Al Mohler laments the passing of the printed Britannica. “My guess is that, all things being equal, a boy my age riding along in the family’s Prius this summer is more likely to be playing Angry Birds on his iPad. Left behind is the unexpected serendipity of reading about the mating habits of aardvarks. Is this progress?”
Heh, he has a point, though it would be better served by another example, don’t you think?
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When you lose the printed book, you lose the “leafing through.”
That was half the fun of the encyclopedia.
Yes, that kind of discovery is limited through a web browser.
@Shelley – hear hear!
One of my life goals is to get a hard copy OED.
I suppose the total randomness of “leafing through” is absent on the web.
But are you telling me you’ve never found yourself reading an article on aardvarks on Wikipedia, half an hour after you went on to look up 19th C American politics, and with no memory of how you got from one to the other?
Or is that just me…?
(And by the way – owning a print Britannica was a dream of mine from my teenage years, finally realised 2 years ago when my wife found me an 1980 edition. So I love the Britannica immensely, and I agree its a very different, and wonderful experience).
PS. Print OED: the Compact Edition is the poor mans version. The entire text, printed in one or 2 volumes with either 4 or 8 pages on each. Complete with its own magnifying glass. My parents have a 1970s 2 volume version. My family has played many happy games of “Balderdash/The Dictionary Game out of it! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OED#Compact_editions